Thoughts From the Tub

How many showers have we taken? How many baths?

A good place to think.

So, you’re an animal standing there washing your naked skin. For eons we as Homo sapiens have denied that we are animals. But look at yourself, you have skin, bone, muscles, and organs just like theirs. Why do you think schools teach comparative anatomy to doctors?

Parents have said, “We made a baby.” But they didn’t. They started the ball rolling, and LIFE took over.

Not one thought from those two people caused these two cells to begin dividing until it made a ball. That ball rolled in on itself, forming the two sides of an animal without human direction. That ball has dominant and recessive sides, yet a heart in the middle. Some conservation was necessary. A circulatory system was necessary to feed the cells, and a heart was born. Now how did that happen?

Cells within those two sides began to differentiate; that is, they became specialized. They knew which ones would be the eyes, the brain, the limbs, the organs, the nerves, the veins, the arteries, the toenails, the fingernails, and the eyelashes. And let’s put some hair on that naked little thing.

And we were born a chemical, electrical, neurological factory. We are a thinking, breathing, eating, drinking, reproducing system—one that can get the next ball rolling.

What a system.

LIFE is so amazing, I wonder why we aren’t all rolling on the ground laughing with joyful exuberance that we have it.

Theology tried to convince us that we are the supreme beings on the planet and that gave us dominion over the whole of the earth. So what did we do? We began using up its resources. We cut the trees. We killed animals for sport. We threw our trash in the rivers and ocean. And unlike other mammals, Homo sapiens became naked.

Why did that happen?

Remember the book, The Naked Ape?

I think its basic conclusion was that men liked naked butts, and natural selection brought it about. I don’t know; I think males bred with women who had hairy butts as well as naked ones. But then, individuals try to mate with the most attractive, strongest, or most cherished person in their society. And women try to make themselves more attractive and desirable. It’s an age-old story.

Even wolves want their pups to be strong, smart, virile, and capable of making the tribe survive. That is desirable in a species.

Being hairless helps keep parasites at bay, making it easier to get rid of mites and fleas. Gosh, those people lived before soap and insecticides were created. Praise the scientists.

Forget about all those smart-ass people who tried to exalt themselves and preach that we have dominion over all of the earth. They were pushing their agenda. Oh yeah, part of our animal nature is a pecking order, where the biggest, strongest, most powerful, or meanest can rally others to their cause and gain power over the rest of their species.

It’s push/pull. Humans have labeled it as a war between good and evil. They say we live in a dualistic world.

But there are moments when we are a sharing world.

There are people whose basic desire is to wage PEACE.

Sometimes the strongest don’t survive; the most cooperative do.

Some cultures don’t throw out their post-menopausal women; they don’t think a woman’s value is to produce; they know grandmothers can help a family thrive and, in turn, help their tribe survive. The whales do that as well.

Bachelor wolves who don’t produce offspring because the alpha male and female have that job tied up, yet they help the tribe by being uncles to the young. Some people have given their lives for others—doesn’t the military use people’s altruistic desire to convince men and women to be soldiers? They are protecting the homeland.

Some individuals have willingly laid down their lives for a cause they believed was worth the loss. Some have given their lives, their most precious commodity, for a friend. Others have deliberately driven their plane into a boat or a building because they were either following orders or believed in their rightness so strongly they thought it was worth it. Some were ignorant enough to believe they would be rewarded with 100 virgins.

Some cherish the earth so much it hurts their hearts to see it ravished.

It has taken us lifetimes to realize there was more to the story. (Although, through the ages, some individuals have seen it.)

It’s a nebulous thing. We see it. Then we question it. We don’t want to be fooled. Neither do we want to be foolish enough to believe anything. It’s tough. We see, we question. We’ve been taught to trust what can be proven, the nuts and bolts of the thing, yet the spirit of a thing often goes unnoticed. We sometimes have out-of-body experiences. We sometimes have near-death experiences. Poo-pooed or not, many believe. And many believe their own experience when they have a ”Knowingness” that turns out to be true—like, why was attendance poor on the day the World Trade Center fell to the ground?

Why do some people miss a plane that crashes?

Were they the chosen ones? Or did they listen to a still small voice others of us are too busy or too distracted to hear?

Men of the Bible wrote of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, and tried to push it into one Supreme Being. We didn’t understand the Trinity.

Now we speak of the Body, Mind, Spirit connection and call it Holistic.

People have long believed in a power outside of us, and we have glimpses of it, but no proof. Still, some of us see the gift we call LIFE as miraculous.

 

Something

 

 

I thought I would make you hungry. This doesn’t have much to do with the story I’m telling, except that I mention the Carnegie Deli in New York, and at the time I was writing about it, it was closed. I wondered if it still is. It is open, and here is a picture of their Rubin sandwich.

 I should have sent this blog four days ago when I was hyped, tickled, and excited.

For some reason, I’m not today.

Maybe I’m scared. Maybe I’m tired. Maybe it’s a completion let-down. Maybe that our washing machine broke down and I need to clear the space for the delivery man to bring in the new one. - Life happens.

Maybe it's not knowing if this novel I’ve had in the works for over thirty years will go anywhere. Yet, yet, I love my characters. They deserve a life, not to sit languishing in my computer.

In my novel,  Song of Africa: Miss Sara Rose wrote at the beginning of her journal:

“There is an old saying that once we start weaving, the gods will provide the skein.”

It turned out to be true for Sara and for me. I did not know when I began writing this story where it was going or where it would end. But the ending came.  A second Sara, a young Sara, entered the picture and completed the story.

I did not see that coming.

When I began this novel, I heard that a protagonist needed to be young and beautiful. So, out of rebellion, I choose to write about an unmarried 65-year-old schoolteacher who retires on the first page. She is beautiful, I couldn’t resist.

“A spinster school teacher?” said a friend. “That will never fly.”

“Oh yes, it will. You don’t know what happens in the story.”

Also, at the beginning of this writing, I didn’t know how a 65-year-old woman would feel.

What a difference 30 years makes.

Of course, I haven’t been working on this story for all of those 30 years. I have done other things, but I kept going back to it. I have aged. My story has evolved. I figured it was my learning story. At first, I wrote by hand, then I learned to compose on the computer. And when I tried to add dialogue, exposition, and description all wrapped together as true novelists do, I felt like the carnival performer spinning plates on vertical poles. The performer runs from one pole to another to keep the plates spinning, if one gets wobbly, it is likely to fall.

Five days ago, I was about ready to chuck the whole thing, for I couldn’t get the beginning right, and after tearing the chapters apart to have time jumps, I put them all back together in chronological order.

Miss Sara Rose leaves her little town of King’s Valley, Kansas, and embarks on her lifelong dream—to ride a river in Africa. And there enters The Rocinante, not the river boat of her dreams but a broken-down old launch (named after Don Quixote’s horse) that takes tourists up and down the Gambia River. The Rocinante has a skipper, a Caucasian engineer from Los Angeles, California. Thus enters a new life for Sara, a romance, a granddaughter, and when another Sara, Miss Sara Rose’s namesake, arrives, well…how much should I tell?

Surprise, I unintentionally ended up with a beautiful young protagonist.

It is the story of three women, Miss Sara Rose, her granddaughter, Patrice DeShane, and Sara Andrews, Aunt Sara’s namesake, their lives and loves. At the present time, it isn’t so outrageous to write about older people falling in love. See, if you wait long enough, your idea will become common. Better get with it to be on the leading edge.

I love hearing about work in progress, so I thought I would tell you a little about what I am doing. And that it is important to complete a project.

When I read the Introduction to Rosamunde Pilscher’s, novel, the NY Times bestseller, The Shell Seekers, where her publisher tells her he would love to make her rich and famous, but so far, she hadn’t produced the goods, she asked what that might be. “A story that spans your life,” he said. “a big fat novel for women.” She took the challenge and in her 60’s wrote The Shell Seekers. When she heard the news that it was a best seller, she was home alone in Scotland, so she shared a celebratory whiskey with the dogs.

I took that as a directive for a novel that spans some 80 years.

Song of Africa, a novel of 96,326 words.

Working cover by me:

 

And I though Last Week was Tough

When someone asked Isaac Asimov, "If you knew you would die tomorrow, what would you do?"   

He answered:  "I'd type faster.

I have adopted his answer.

Not that anyone told me I was going to die tomorrow, but when you go into the hospital, they always bring up the end-of-life directive. They want to know what to do with you if your heart stops beating.

I had a heart attack this past week and was in the hospital for two days.

But now I'm home and talking to you, and my little fingers (not little) are typing faster.

I had a super stressful event, and I thought my reaction was an adrenaline rush, except that after my daughter badgered me into having a blood test, it revealed that the enzyme that is released when the heart is damaged was in my blood.

See, your heart calls out for help when it needs it.

Take that advice to heart. If you need help or support, ask for it. Our mission is, or should be, to support each other.

And see how often we use the word 'heart'? "Bless your heart." "Heart-break," I love you with all my heart."

Your heart is sweet and lovable—love it back.

The afternoon after I came home from the hospital, I lay on the couch reading a novel. Sweetpea our little dog lay on the pillow beside my head. Zeke, our 3-legged German Shepherd lay on the couch at my feet warming them. And Laffe, the coon-hound lay on the floor beside me.

 This is heaven, I thought.

 

  

Since I believe in the Mind-Body-Spirit connection, that our physical issues are not separate from our minds, and that our minds are not separate from our Spiritual understandings, I'm here to say, I don't know what the f* I'm talking about.

But I do know about being grateful.

I love my life, and I love having one. I love having the opportunity to express myself on the page and having people read what I write. There are many reasons to be grateful.

And today I just had a conversation with my husband about LIFE.

As I have mentioned before, I signed up for a major in Biology after the college professor yelled out over a class of about 200, "This is the study of LIFE."

Biologists study living things—and dead ones. But they don't know about life.

Nobody does.

The subject moves into an esoteric, philosophical, theological, idealistic, and magical reality, and yes, a biological one, but that's the physical part.

We are more than our bodies.

Think about it, we have always been alive—except for First Cause, and I don't know about that. We came from our parents, who came from their parents, back and way back some 300,000 years to the Mitochondrial Eve, the first woman. How did she come into being?

Here we are, a result of that magical progression, and look what we are doing. Instead of saying, "Wow, look at us. Aren't we lucky!" We gripe and complain, and treat each other, as well as the animals and the earth, poorly.  I'm not talking about you. I'm talking about the collective humanity. Which, it seems to me, is having an identity crisis right now.

Collective humanity doesn't know who they are or what to think. Or they believe so strongly that they will beat their fellows over the head with a belief system, or shoot them.

Yet, they have the spark of life in them.

Where did that come from?

You might say, "From God," but that is magic. What is Life?

Those ova and sperm were alive before they got together and fired off an entirely new set of instructions.

 

It's time for me to reconnect with some of my long-held inspirations and motivations.

Are you with me?

Here is my oracle for the day from Thomas and Penelope Pauley:

"The sooner you define your life, the easier it is for the Universe to create it for you."